Not A Snark

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====== The Hook Mountain Massacre ======

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We've just completed the third part of the //Rise of the Runelords// adventure path for //Pathfinder//, bringing us to the halfway point with the characters at 10th level. We have a fairly straightforward set of characters - a Sorcerer, a Fighter, a Thief and a Cleric. For this chapter in the path, we switched to using the //Pathfinder Unchained// rules, and also to using the medium experience point progression (we had been using the fast progression, as recommended in the adventure).

If you're planning on playing in this, there may be spoilers ahead.

With a slower progression, I was able to bring in a few side quests to flesh things out a bit and introduce some more of the setting to the players. Not all side quests were followed up, and indeed some parts of the main adventure weren't completed so the party only just made it to 10th level by the end. This wasn't a particular problem though.

The fighter in particular feels way overpowered for the sort of foes they are going up against. The fight with the Gruals was particularly easy with most of them going down in one round, and though some of the ogres in Fort Rannick could hit hard, they also went down quite quickly. Standard ogres were pretty irrelevant (the majority being taken out with a single fireball).

The most dangerous critter in the whole adventure was the construct at Skull Crossing, which came close to TPKing the party, even though this didn't feel like it was meant to be hard. The biggest surprise was that the party failed to open the floodgates on the dam, mostly because they really didn't want to use the Thassilonian device. Shortly afterwards the dam burst, wiping out Turtleback Ferry (they had fortunately removed everyone's tattoos very early on) and flooding Whitewillow (as well as numerous settlements downstream). 

They completed the adventure though, slaying Barl and finding the hint to take them back to Sandpoint. However, they aren't quite viewed as heroes by the locals.

This third part of the path felt a lot more of a straightforward hack and slash than the previous two, with the exception of the sudden moral quandary at the dam that I really wasn't expecting given how the characters had been played previously. It's also starting to suffer from the old D&D problem of power creep, and even though everyone has core classes, the differences between the character builds are starting to become very apparent (the fighter is the strongest character, the cleric the weakest, with the thief and sorcerer somewhere in the middle).

I'll probably run the 4th adventure (Fortress of the Stone Giants) at some point (maybe next year), though I don't have a burning desire to continue things right now.

Next up for our weekly gaming, we are probably going to be going back to //Legend of the Five Rings//, and I might start thinking about preparing some //Savage Worlds//.